Girls just wanna have fun

If you read my email last week, I talked about how the last 11 years of my life shaped where I am at today,

My whole point being that I am far from an overnight success.

If you missed that one, go here to read it first. 

Now, where was I?

The Bachelorette Party Era

Girls, 

They just wanna have fun. Everything else is trivial. 

I know this for a fact, having a job as a swim instructor in college and taking classes in biology and psychology,

Nearly all of my co-workers, classmates and friends were women.

Sounds like the dream of any college boy…right?

Honestly?

Yeah. It was awesome. 

Having a group of female friends meant I got into any nightclub without problems,

There was always free food cause they all over-pack and never eat anything,

And If I ever needed girl advice, I had my board of directors to guide me.

But the biggest lesson I learned was the lengths women go to have fun.

I’m serious,

The lengths my friends would go to in order to get VIP tickets to sold out concerts, 

or the psychological warfare they would deploy on club promotors or local businessmen to get free stuff…

And don’t even get me started on the background checks they would do on dudes before a date…

I swear if the same energy was focused elsewhere, a groupchat of college girls could overthrow NATO.

But that’s not “fun”. 

And being business minded, I always wondered if I could tap into that “fun” with some sort of business. 

Around that time, I had just learned about e-commerce businesses and I was specifically looking at Amazon.

Every day, I would open up the site, and look for trends in demand and competition for different niches, or products:

Dog leashes, book shelves, suitcases…whatever came to mind.

I was trying to find a nice combination of something in high demand, that didn’t have too much competition. 

I wasn’t having much luck…

Until one day, one of my friends told me she was looking for special balloons for her friends bachelorette party.

She wanted something like this (It’s a balloon about 1 meter in length):

She could not find it anywhere and had to drive 40 mins out of town to grab one.

That lead me to checking out Amazon, and low and behold…

Keywords like bachelorette party, bridal party, etc were searched often, but there were not many offerings…

I had just found my product…

And it was for fucking bachelorette parties…what is my life?

I decided to jump in. 

I found suppliers in China from Alibaba.

Created my own product photos in my parents living room,

This was my main image, the banner and balloons were part of the kit I made, and the rest of the stuff was what I found in the dollarstore, the white backdrop is just cheap poster paper.

I asked a few of my friends to pose with my products,

I put it all together…

And away I went!

Things were going well at first, I was getting a few sales a day, but then, 

My listing got taken down with no explanation, Amazon Seller customer service was useless, and when I finally got it reinstated, I lost the “buy box” (which is a big deal on Amazon, trust me). 

I’d managed to sell my first batch of 100 units and reinvested everything—plus my day-job savings—into a bigger second batch of 500 units, along with better photos and descriptions. I was all in.

But then, a massive Amazon seller swooped in, copied my product, and priced it lower. 

And because they had money coming in from other products, they could afford to make far less on this listing until they owned the market. 

I was stuck with hundreds of units I couldn’t sell at a profit. 

My best option was to sell them at break-even just to get rid of inventory. 

I was pretty beaten up about it. 

But I got my first taste of e-commerce and I learned some valuable lessons. 

Plus I actually pulled off taking an idea to an actual revenue generating business. 

My friend Jay, who i mention in the previous email, witnessed the rise and fall of all of this.

Jay was also there to watch me go through the next milestone, my Real Estate Ventures…

But that’s a story for next week.

Stay Tuned…

- Vessal